Timbuktu, an ancient city in the African country of Mali, is home to a number of old tombs made of mud and stone, many of which were recently destroyed by a jihadist group linked to Al Qaeda.
Now one of the perpetrators, Ahmad al-Faqu al-Mahdi, has been sentenced to nine to eleven years in prison after a trial in The Hague.. Mr. al-Madhi, now contrite, identified structures to be destroyed and even provided the pickaxes and crowbars to carry out the destruction.
Andras Riedlmayer, a scholar of Islamic art, said, “The courts have been slow to recognize this, but there is a clear link between crimes committed against people and attacks on their cultural heritage. The ethnic cleansers in the Balkans, like the jihadis in Iraq, Syria and Timbuktu and other places, are keenly aware of this, which is why they devote so much personnel and resources to the destruction of religious and cultural landmarks.”
The destruction of art work, like the massive Buddhist statues in Bamiyan Afghanistan, is permanent. The original is gone forever.
My opinion is that anyone who destroys an archeological treasure or an important cultural heritage deserves the death penalty. Those evil people have diminished our world in ways never to be undone.
Information for this post came from “Extremist Pleads Guilty to Destroying Cultural Sites in Mali,” New York Times (Aug. 23, 2016), p. A8.
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